“There, there, Annie, dear, don’t take on so,” he quavered timidly, putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her elbow.  She turned and sank upon his shoulder with such violence that he tottered a little.  He did not even glance toward the coffin, but continued to look at her with a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the whip.  His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and burned with miserable shame.  When his wife rushed from the room, her daughter strode after her with set lips.  The servant stole up to the coffin, bent over it for a moment, and then slipped away to the kitchen, leaving Steavens, the lawyer, and the father to themselves.  The old man stood looking down at his dead son’s face.  The sculptor’s splendid head seemed even more noble in its rigid stillness than in life.  The dark hair had crept down upon the wide forehead; the face seemed strangely long, but in it there was not that repose we expect to find in the faces of the dead.  The brows were so drawn that there were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the chin was thrust forward defiantly.  It was as though the strain of life had been so sharp and bitter that death could not at once relax the tension and smooth the countenance into perfect peace—­as though he were still guarding something precious, which might even yet be wrested from him.

The old man’s lips were working under his stained beard.  He turned to the lawyer with timid deference:  “Phelps and the rest are comin’ back to set up with Harve, ain’t they?” he asked.  “Thank’ee, Jim, thank’ee.”  He brushed the hair back gently from his son’s forehead.  “He was a good boy, Jim; always a good boy.  He was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest of ’em all—­only we didn’t none of us ever onderstand him.”  The tears trickled slowly down his beard and dropped upon the sculptor’s coat.

“Martin, Martin!  Oh, Martin! come here,” his wife wailed from the top of the stairs.  The old man started timorously:  “Yes, Annie, I’m coming.”  He turned away, hesitated, stood for a moment in miserable indecision; then reached back and patted the dead man’s hair softly, and stumbled from the room.

“Poor old man, I didn’t think he had any tears left.  Seems as if his eyes would have gone dry long ago.  At his age nothing cuts very deep,” remarked the lawyer.

Something in his tone made Steavens glance up.  While the mother had been in the room, the young man had scarcely seen any one else; but now, from the moment he first glanced into Jim Laird’s florid face and blood-shot eyes, he knew that he had found what he had been heartsick at not finding before—­the feeling, the understanding, that must exist in some one, even here.

The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred by dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye.  His face was strained—­that of a man who is controlling himself with difficulty—­and he kept plucking at his beard with a sort of fierce resentment.  Steavens, sitting by the window, watched him turn down the glaring lamp, still its jangling pendants with an angry gesture, and then stand with his hands locked behind him, staring down into the master’s face.  He could not help wondering what link there had been between the porcelain vessel and so sooty a lump of potter’s clay.